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Mexico town fights drug cartels with priests' blessing

APATZINGÁN, Mexico -Tortilla mills here stopped production for several days recently, denying locals the most basic of daily staples. Taxis and public transport suspended service on Day of the Dead, leaving

Mexico town fights drug cartels with priests' blessing

Townspeople are arming themselves to stop the savagery and misery caused by Mexican drug cartels — and the local parish priests are chiming in.

Bishop Miguel Patiño Velázquez of Apatzingán, Mexico, published an open letter Oct. 15 alleging criminal groups in the state of Michoacán are choking commerce in an attempt to win back territories they looted, but lost to vigilante groups that rose up against them.(Photo: David Agren for USA TODAY)

Story Highlights

Public security agency data shows an average of 1,555 intentional homicides per month

Rival drug gangs have made life intolerable for years

Catholic priests are not discouraging parishioners from arming themselves

APATZINGÁN, Mexico — Tortilla mills stopped production for several days recently, denying locals the most basic of daily staples. Taxi drivers refused to take fares on the Day of the Dead, leaving many people unable to attend annual graveyard vigils.

Even gas stations regularly run out of gasoline because tanker trucks won't come in.

Rival drug gangs have made life intolerable for years for the law-abiding citizens in Tierra Caliente, or Hot Earth, a rugged region 300 miles west of Mexico City. But now they are taking the law into their own hands and are being joined in their armed insurgency by Catholic priests.

"This is like a cancer in our society," says Catholic Bishop Miguel Patiño Velázquez of Apatzingán.

Patiño is one of many Catholic priests who don't discourage their parishioners from arming themselves to put an end to criminal groups accused of everything from running extortion rackets to kidnapping people for ransom to making methamphetamine.

The bishop blasted the security situation in an Oct. 15 open letter and assailed the Mexican government for leaving his parishioners at the mercy of criminals in his home state of Michoacán.

He has publicly blamed the local police and officials as corrupt, taking bribes instead of doing their jobs to protect people. Priests in the diocese of Apatzingán say they have received death threats, too.

His outcry comes as Mexico, under President Enrique Peña Nieto, has been accused of softening its law enforcement efforts against the drug cartels that have taken over some provinces of Mexico and operated with impunity for years.

Peña Nieto said he would bring a new strategy to Mexico's struggle with organized crime — one that de-emphasized the targeting of drug kingpins and focused on reducing homicides, extortion cases and kidnappings.

And he claims success over his predecessor, Felipe Calderón. The Peña Nieto administration reports that one year into his presidency, the homicide rate has dropped by 18% (though it says there has been a 35% increase in kidnappings). It also points to the arrest of two major leaders of the Zeta and Gulf cartels this year.

But many analysts dispute the claim that crime is down and question whether the Peña Nieto administration is fudging statistics.

Molly Molloy, a specialist on Latin America at the New Mexico State University Library in Las Cruces, N.M., says the data the government uses conflicts with crime reports amassed by Mexico's Executive Secretariat of Public Security, according to a study published in the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

The public security agency data show an average of 1,555 intentional homicides per month since Peña Nieto took office — or about 52 people per day — which is slightly less than the average across all six years of the Calderón administration.

Despite claims that crime is being subdued, Mexico continues to be a place "where violent conflict in the past six years has killed more than 135,000 people and caused the disappearances of at least 25,000 people," Molloy says.

The people of Tierra Caliente seem well aware of that. Their ordeal is a rude reminder of the difficulties in dismantling drug cartels and organized crime that Patiño says has left Michoacán with "all the characteristics of a failed state."

Vigilante groups here have armed themselves and formed "community police" forces to stop the violence. It has worked, say locals, but the gangs are trying to retake control by making life hard in a sort of modern-day siege. They are threatening businesses if they don't pay extortion money, bribing officials to keep quiet and frightening suppliers away, people and priests say.

Soldiers load into a truck as they patrol through Apatzingan, a town in the state of Michoacan, Mexico, on Nov. 5, 2013. Apatzingan is located near the city of Lazaro Cardenas, where Mexico's military has taken control of one of the nation's seaports as part of an effort to bring drug-cartel activity under control.(Photo: Dario Lopez-Mills, AP)

The killings, threats and corruption often go unreported in the media because journalists are threatened with death if they write about it, they say.

Father Andrés Larios makes no apologies for assisting the vigilantes, such as when he lets them ring the church bells in times of emergency and to warn people of danger.

"They've taken their money, raped their women, done whatever they want," he says of the cartels. "This is a savage place."

Vigilantes took the town of Tancítaro on Saturday and have promised to move on more places under the control of cartels.

But some accuse the vigilantes of having unclean hands. Among the cartels they have been trying to keep out is the Knights Templar, a quasi-religious cartel controlling much of the crime in the region. Earlier this year the state government accused vigilantes of teaming with a rival to the Knights Templar cartel — the Jalisco New Generation cartel — to keep the Knights Templar out.

There have been several bouts of violence between the vigilantes and Knights Templar recently. A wave of attacks on 18 electrical substations and four Pemex gasoline stations in Apatzingán have been blamed on the cartel.

"They have this military and organizational ability … that is able to put the state in the condition that it is now," Miguel Ángel Sánchez, content director of Michoacán news agency Quadratín, says of the Knights Templar cartel.

The priests in the Diocese of Apatzingán admit that outside cartels have offered assistance. But they say it has been refused because people here are sick of all cartels.

The federal government has sent more soldiers recently to Michoacán. The army also assumed policing duties this month in the port city of Lázaro Cárdenas in Michoacán, where cartels allegedly smuggle in chemicals for making meth.

But the priests say the government help is not enough. The people must stand up for themselves.